The present invention relates generally to the field of software applications, and more particularly to generating files associated with another file format within a software application.
With the continued miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers have grown in popularity. The same developments that spurred the growth of laptop computers and other portable computers have allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular phones and handheld computing devices resulting in mobile computing devices (e.g., a smartphone, a personal digital assistant, a tablet, etc.). Mobile computing devices are capable of running a variety of operating systems and thus allow users to perform tasks while in transit.
Users rely on computing devices, mobile computing devices, and telecommunications equipment to produce, store, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data to produce a work product through productivity software. Productivity software is application software designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities that produce information, such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, etc. Collections of application software (e.g., software suite) include related functionality that shares a common user interface thus allowing some ability to exchange data amongst the various individual instances of application software. For example, an office suite is a collection of bundled productivity software that includes a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation program that is capable of exchanging data amongst the three programs.
Data is exchanged amongst application programs of a software suite and/or with compatible application software through the use of cut, copy, and paste functions associated with a clipboard and a clipboard manager. The clipboard includes functions and messages that enable application software to transfer data between applications and/or within an application. The clipboard manager adds functionality to the clipboard of an operating system by enhancing the basic functions of cut, copy, and paste operations with one or more feature. For example, the clipboard manager includes multiple buffers that merge, split, and edit contents; select the buffer to store data from a cut or copy; select the buffer the paste data should be retrieved from; handle formatted text, tabular data, data objects, media content, and uniform resource locators (URLs); save copied data to long term storage; index and/or tag clipped data; and search saved data.